Christians, when put to death, were not so executed in attestation of
any accounts delivered by them, but wholly and solely because of the
evil deeds and the scandalous practices rightly or wrongly attributed to
them. Supposing--what is not true--that they had been executed for their
creed, there is no pretence that they were eye-witnesses of the miracles
of Christ.

Paley's first argument is drawn "from the nature of the case"--i.e.,
that persecution ought to have taken place, whether it did or not,
because both Jews and Gentiles would reject the new creed. So far as the
Jews are concerned, we hear of no persecution from Josephus. If we
interrogate the Christian Acts, we hear but of little, two persons only
being killed. We learn also that "many thousands of Jews" belonged to
the new sect, and were propitiated by Christian conformity to the law;
and that, when the Jews rose against Paul--not as a Christian, but as a
breaker of the Mosaic law--he was promptly delivered by the Romans, who
would have set him at liberty had he not elected to be tried at Rome. If
we turn to the conduct of the Pagans, we meet the same blank absence of
evidence of persecution, until we come to the disputed passage in
Tacitus, wherein none of the eye-witnesses are said to have been
concerned; and we have, on the other side, the undisputed fact that,
under the imperial rule of Rome, every subject nation practised its own
creed undisturbed, so long as it did not incite to civil disturbances.
"The religious tenets of the Galileans, or Christians, were never made a
subject of punishment, or even of inquiry" ("Decline and Fall," vol.
ii., p. 215).

This view of the matter is thoroughly corroborated by Lardner: "The
disciples of Jesus Christ were under the protection of the Roman law,
since the God they worshipped and whose worship they recommended, was